Front and Center: Collaboration Versus Communication

Collaborative authoring adds many people to a procedure that was at one time completed by only one. Having a team decide on (or even develop) design elements might be an invitation to disaster and should be approached carefully. Just because you have the tools to collaborate doesn't mean that you have the tools to communicate.

Everyone on your team needs to know what is expected from them and what you expect the final site to look like. Whiteboarding a site and providing initial planning screenshots to an approval team is an effective way to handle the design process. Making sure that everyone understands exactly what the site is going to look like and requiring that everyone follow the directions is a mandatory step.

The best way to get around the problems associated with group design is to divide the team in such a way that the actual design process is limited to as few participants as possible. Make a decision about who is in charge of the design and aesthetic aspects of the project, and trust him to bring the project to completion.

Consider using your FrontPage Web site to store the results of your whiteboarding sessions. This way, everyone on the team will be able to reference back to them. Obviously, set the permissions so that the normal public isn't able to access that information.